The Abyss Stares Back

The Curtain, Pulled Back

20

APR/15

We clean up after ourselves at the end of the fight. I go around the town, hunting down the rest of the woven and releasing then from their servitude. Milosh descends into the basement and destroys all of the evidence they’re storing down there, like the jars of fluids and the torture implements. Mads destroys Blackburn’s body very carefully, out back where none of the townsfolk can see. He retrieves a note from the body saying that someone was reporting all of this to Strahd. And an iron rook symbol.

Mads wants to retrieve Sebastian immediately, but we decide to wait until the next morning. After a long argument, of course. And then we go to the farm. The farmers are OK, and Sebastian is still in the basement in the position that we left him in.

Mads pulls the stake and Sebastian comes back to unlife, grabbing Mads around the neck and growling. A chicken shake takes the worst of the edge off, and then we chat and apologize.

It gets a little weird. Sebastian feels really bad about what he is, and Mads essentially wants to treat him as a pet. We tell him that we are going to Point Hope to rebuild and that he can join us there. And he takes a long drink from our elf so that he doesn’t murder the farmers upstairs.

Incidental vision: Man with a scar across his face is terrified and doesn’t want to fight. Not what he appears to be, but is desperate and knows too much.

We leave the farmhouse, after warning the farmers to head to Kreszk before Sebastian can come upstairs. Along the road, Mars and Milosh see signs of the ambush where the captain was taken. There is a separate trail leading out of the ambush that looks to have been made by a few men escaping the attack. We follow.

We eventually come to a small camp populated by cowardly recruits and wounded men. We recruit them for the return to Point Hope, doing what we can for the wounded in the process.

Onward to point hope! It’s destroyed, looted and empty, which hits Milosh hard. The fortress needs a lot of repair to make it livable again, and we start to plan for its reconstruction.

But then we get a phone call from Johanna! She is under continued attack from shadow assassins sent by the Awakened, and they have redoubled their efforts against her since she’s been helping us. She asks us to go to Teufeldorf, where she’s tracked down the source of the creatures. Since we are busy at Point Hope, we send Sebastian to her to serve as temporary protection while we finish boosting the defenses of Point Hope and then go to Teufeldorf.

So we do that. Upon arriving at the city, we go to the location described, which is a graveyard behind the temple. What terrible clerics. Then we break into one of the mausoleums that seems to be occupied and fight the cultists that we conveniently find there. One of them has a scar over his eye, like Sebastian described, and we decide to keep him alive, since he knows too much. Unlike his two unfortunate companions…

There is a note in the tomb that totally throws us, saying that the men here know that the scholar is going to send the Synod to attack them. And we were just sent by… Johanna… who is being watched by Sebastian…